Believe it or not, once upon a time, furniture was purely functional. Furniture designers did not make an effort to put any sort of artistic design into their furniture-the furniture was strictly utilitarian. Today, however, modern kitchen chairs are works of art! Some people assume that modern chairs and contemporary chairs need to be painted in certain ways and be made from specific materials. The truth is that as long as your chairs have artistic merit and can be multifunctional they can be considered contemporary chairs and modern chairs.

For the purposes of this article, we will use the terms modern and contemporary interchangeably. While in terms of art history the two are very different, when looking at furniture, there is not a lot of difference between the two.

If the chairs in your kitchen can serve many purposes while still being chairs they are modern chairs. If the chairs can be used as works of art, they are modern/contemporary chairs.